


Black, Blue, White, Green

by gardnerhill



Category: Basil of Baker Street - All Media Types, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Animals, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-28
Updated: 2012-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:51:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The colors mice can see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black, Blue, White, Green

**Author's Note:**

> For a [Watson's Woes](watsons-woes.livejournal.com) 2012 July writing prompt: Use four of the six random words in your fic (Thirteen, green, ice, meeting, carpet, train).
> 
> The Eve Titus "Basil of Baker Street" series of books is very different from the Disney "Great Mouse Detective" film version. This story is based on the books. (I have also written fic based on the Disney film [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/489367).)

The rat led us a merry chase through that train, I'll tell you! Basil refused to let the bounder out of our sight ("Faster, Dawson, Wickham's escaping!"), even though the brute was bigger than four of us – and I refused to let Basil chase him alone; while I had breath in my body and a pistol at my side I was his mouse. 

We scampered over carpet – ah we were now in the first class car – to the accompaniment of screams, cries of disgust and breaking glass (how I hated that we two were lumped in with that dreadful rat as _vermin_ by the humans!).

Out through the door, into the biting cold. The sun was mid-sky but the winter river the train rattled over was pure black death, flecked with white ice. 

Wickham whipped around, grinning all over his ugly face. "Mister Basil! Nice meeting you!" He had a knife in his paw. 

My soldier's wits told me he'd have my friend torn like a cat's prey by the time I stopped to aim my gun. So I simply dashed past my friend and barreled into Wickham's stomach, squealing like a stoat. 

I heard Basil's shout of dismay over the whistle in my ears, the surprised grunt of the winded rat as we flew through the air. I was so warmed by my rage that I don't even think I was frightened by my looming death. Then the black water slapped me. 

_Oh, Dawson, you fool._

All I could see was the black of that horrible cold squeezing me, squeezing my breath, so cold I'd never been warm in my whole life and would never be warm again. Up, and the blue of the morning sky; down, the black of the winter river. 

Swim. Swim for the shore. But I was so cold I could barely move. 

"Move your feet, old man, you can do it!" Basil's voice echoed in my ears. I was not surprised that my friend would occupy my dying thoughts. "Swim, Dawson. You need to help me! Swim!" 

Army discipline – you obeyed your general no matter what. I moved my feet and paws (or thought I did, for I could not feel them), and I seemed to move. I kept bumping into one ice-floe again and again – one a little less white and cold than the others. 

The river tried to pull me down, but Basil had given me an order. I swam, head bobbing (black / blue, black/ blue, blue, blue – I was keeping my head up, breathe), bumping into the ice floe that talked to me in Basil's voice. 

Green. I could see green ahead. The first tender green grass of spring. Nostalgia stung my eyes more than the icy water – we never saw such green outside the park in London, not since I was a pup in the country with my littermates. Would I see my mother again, calling me down into her warm burrow, as I sank for the last time?

Green. Green, and the black of a warm burrow. "Mum," I murmured as I curled up in the lovely dry grass beside another mouse's body. 

*** 

I smelled green when I woke up – the lovely new green of fresh juicy young grass. But Basil was beside me instead of my mother – looking as wet and bedraggled as I felt – and as alive as I still was. 

"You brave idiot," he said affectionately, still rubbing my fur with a bit of the sweet hay that lined this deserted burrow on the riverbank. "If you'd wanted to frighten me to death you could not have chosen a better way."

Our clothes lay strung on twigs outside, drying in the sun; only then did I realize that we were both as naked as wild mice. I began to groom my stomach fur to hide my embarrassment. "Was saving your life, old man. What of Wickham?"

"Escaped, alas," Basil said and sighed, taking a moment to give himself a rough toweling with the dry grass. "Rats are better swimmers than we are, damn the way of it. We've enough information from his doings to continue the investigation into the Ottery St. Mary thefts; there'll be time enough later to find this blackguard and bring him to justice."

I grunted in disappointment. But a warm paw on my neck made me look up.

Basil's eyes were shining, black as the river but warm as the burrow. "But I would have hunted him to the ends of the earth, if he'd taken my Boswell from me."


End file.
